#Being meta definition software

Literally, “data about data”, data that defines and describes the characteristics of other data, used to improve both business and technical understanding of data and data-related processes. The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management defines meta-data as: Therefore, the only proper terms are meta-data and metadata. Meta must be combined with a root word, either with a hyphen or by concatenation. The dictionary goes on to list at least 20 words with meta as a prefix, such as metaphysics, metamorphosis, metastasis, metaplasia, metaphase, metathesis, metacarpal, metacenter, meta-galaxy, meta-fiction, and so on. The dictionary defines meta as a prefix, meaning it cannot stand by itself.

The term meta data is not proper in the English language. Many of the definitions are tautologies, such as data about data. Such lawsuits would likely not have been won because that company failed to protect their trademark.Ī recent Internet search showed over 27,000,000 hits for metadata and over 87,000,000 hits for meta-data, with literally thousands of those hits being definitions that are incomplete, overlapping, and conflicting. They suggested using the terms meta-data or meta data instead. Subsequent to that article, a company in California trademarked the term metadata and proceeded to threaten lawsuits against anyone using that term. Ron Ross, in his Database Newsletter, which was published and copyrighted, wrote an article circa late 1980s that meta-data had come of age and deserved to be elevated to metadata. The term originated as meta-data and was used consistently for many years. These views indicate meta-data are a perception about business data that varies with the observer.Ī second misperception with meta-data is the spelling.

Different parts of an organization have a set of data useful to them that they consider business data, while any other data that are ancillary to the business data are considered meta-data. These different views have led to the statement One person’s data is another person’s meta-data.

#Being meta definition software

A software company refers to their products as the data and the details about those products as meta-data. However, the financial officers in a publishing company consider sales, distribution, and so on as data, and the title, author, copyright, and so on, as meta-data.Īnother example is the photo industry that considers the photo itself as a piece of data and the f-stop, speed, filters, time, date, location, and so on as meta-data. Other data about publications, such as reviews, sales, distribution, and so on, are considered meta-data. However, that traditional definition has expanded unreasonably due to poor definition and many connotative interpretations.įor example, publishers consider publication title, author, publisher, publication date, ISBN, price, and so on as business data. They were data that helped people understand and manage their data resource so that it could be fully utilized to support the organization’s current and future business information demand. Meta-data traditionally represented data names, data definitions, data structure, data edits, and so on. The first common misperception is the difference between meta-data and business data. It’s those errors that are seriously impacting formal data resource management. The term meta-data has become quite meaningless and has led to numerous misconceptions about what meta-data represent and how they are used. If a group of people were asked to define meta-data, there would be as many different definitions as there were people in the group. That definition is neither comprehensive nor denotative and can be interpreted in many different ways through individual connotative interpretations. The term meta-data has typically been defined as data about data, which is a tautology. The confusion about a concept as important as understanding the meaning of all the data in an organization’s data resource leads to increased data disparity and low quality data that do not fully meet an organization’s current and future business information demand. These terms are an excellent example of the huge lexical challenge that data resource management faces today. The terms meta-data and metadata have been used, misused, and abused to the point that the real meaning is totally unclear and may even be unknown.